


Death Before Decaf and Other Lies

by HarpiaHarpyja



Series: How Soon Unaccountable [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Actual Force Nerd Kylo Ren, Canon Compliant, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Gen, Mutual Pining, Post TLJ, Rey Eats Like an Animal, Rey Hates Coffee, Reylo - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-04
Updated: 2018-02-04
Packaged: 2019-03-13 14:29:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13572519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HarpiaHarpyja/pseuds/HarpiaHarpyja
Summary: In the weeks that follow the assault on Crait, Rey and Kylo Ren have determined that instances of their connection through the Force may be best passed in silence. Still, Kylo remains unable to keep his need to understand it in check. When the connection opens as they both attempt to get through dinner, he tries to needle Rey into admitting that she too can't abandon her curiosity regarding the potential of their bond.





	Death Before Decaf and Other Lies

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted via Tumblr at thisgarbagepicker as a prompt response that proceeded to go slightly wayward. Any further installations in this series will be related, but may or may not address the prompt.
> 
> _Because Ben is such a dork curious about the limitations of the Force Bond, he convinces Rey to experiment with him and see if they can pass anything besides small droplets of water between them. This can be as innocent or as dirty as you want._

The door slid shut behind Rey, cutting off the voices fading down the hall and leaving her in stark silence. She set her food tray on the small table against the wall, then dropped to the edge of her bed on the opposite side of the room to remove her boots and exchange her sweaty clothing for something fresh for sleeping. Her hair as she shook it out of the single bun she’d coiled it into that morning was also sweaty, but unfortunately there was little to do for that beyond run her fingers through it to remove any tangles and let the dry air of her room do its work. Suddenly it was sorely tempting to forgo the meal despite her designs only a minute earlier to extinguish the protests of her empty stomach as quickly as possible. She could just sleep.

It would not be the first time she had gone a day without any real food, and training with Finn and Rose had sapped much of Rey’s energy. She was still without a saber. The undertaking of building her own from the shattered Skywalker relic was proving more challenging than she’d expected. For now, any combat practice took the form of combining her years of self-taught quarterstaff defense with Finn’s lifetime of more regimented Stormtrooper drills. Both of those were new to Rose, who held her own by being quite capable with a blaster. The arrangement worked well for them all in terms of exchange of expertise, but it left Rey drained by day’s end on top of her other activities.

Given that tomorrow held more of the same, Rey convinced herself that it would not be in her best interest to go to bed on an empty stomach. Her decision was reinforced by an uncomfortable rumble in her belly. She stood, grimacing at some soreness in her calf where Rose had dealt a surprisingly sharp blow an hour before, and made her way to the table, stretching her legs and arms slowly between steps until the tightness faded.

She was beginning her meal when she felt the air deaden as an invisible thread of energy pricked at her senses and made the hairs on the back of her neck rise.

Rey would have sighed, but her mouth was full. The minor inconvenience of Ben’s abrupt appearance at the other side of the table was no crisis worth interrupting dinner over. She was accustomed to these visitations, as he was. 

Arguably it was barely a change in the nature of her meal at all, because the last two times this had happened after Crait, it seemed as if it might be best if they simply didn’t speak. Rey was not going to go to him; he was not going to come to her. The enduring connection complicated that, but it did not change the situation. Neither of them had asked for this. And so they settled into a more or less mutual resignation. 

It was fine with Rey. Disappointing and not unpainful. But fine. Safer, too, as she wasn’t sure she entirely trusted herself not to say or do something rashly naive again. 

She did glance up at Ben, though. The current arrangement somewhat dictated that she had little choice but to do so. Her room was tiny and distinctly lacking in interesting things to look at despite her attempts to make it homey. Acknowledging him was better than just waiting the connection out in leaden silence. She focused on the coolness of the floor beneath her bare feet to keep herself grounded on her side of reality. 

Ben was regarding her with wary expectance. His hair, a bit longer each time the Force facilitated their connection, was brushed back, possibly damp. The dark shirt he wore was looser fitting than the tunic she was accustomed to and left his arms bare to the shoulder. He was seated, and his throat constricted as if he was swallowing something, which made Rey think he might be in the midst of a meal as well. That was convenient. At least they each had a distraction for however long this would last.

Inclining her head in a mute greeting when he said and did nothing, Rey turned back to her food: a protein bar, a small dish of thin stew, and a dense fist-sized roll made of some hardy root vegetable she’d never heard of. Pickings around the current Resistance base were utilitarian enough. But they were also notably better than any portions she’d had on Jakku or rations found stored away in the _Falcon_ , and she began attacking her plate with gusto.

“I didn’t realize the situation was so desperate over there.”

Rey had just ripped off a second large bite of the roll and was contemplating whether its toughness was a natural quality of the ingredients or merely a clue that it had been sitting around for a while, and the sound of Ben’s voice startled her enough that she paused chewing. Cheeks puffed and jaw contorted with the amount of food in her mouth, she frowned across the table and took her time finishing before giving a curt answer. 

“What?” Rey noticed that Ben hadn’t actually eaten anything since the connection opened. He’d been watching her eat instead. This annoyed her.

“You eat like a starved animal. Like someone is about to take your food from you.” He sounded almost amused, which rankled Rey further. “Though given how long it took you to get that down, I can’t think why someone would want to.”

She scowled and turned her attention to the contents of her meal to avoid having to dignify that with an immediate reply. She’d thought too many times about how another conversation with Ben might go. This scenario was deviating from any she had let herself imagine, even the more outlandish ones. Rey took a defiant and deliberately undainty bite of the protein bar. 

She may have been seeing things, but she thought there was a hint of a smile on Ben’s face. “I’ve been too busy today to eat yet. And this is how I eat. If it’s a problem for you, focus on your own food until this ends.” 

Yes, a smile. Fleeting and tiny and sidelong, but there.

Possibly, he’d been looking for a way to break their silence, and he seized on the first mundane thing available. It only reminded Rey how easy it would be to respond in kind. This was so much simpler than the fraught, tempestuous conversations she’d expected and dreaded. She was still uncertain, and her unabated hunger surely wasn’t helping, but her irritation was waning. There was some part of her that wanted this to be distinctly not difficult.

“If you’re going to sit there commenting on my eating habits, it’s a waste of time.” He hadn’t said anything further, but she could feel his judgment, which was just as bad. She flattened her palms on the table and willed her voice to remain even. “You know we don’t get very much.”

Ben considered this and retreated back in his chair. “Right. Do you—” Whatever he was going to ask, he stopped to rethink it, head canting slightly to the left. His voice was low and calm, the way she heard it any time she parsed these meetings in their aftermath. “Rey, don’t you wonder about how this is working?”

She tried not to answer too quickly and looked impassively at her hands. “Yes.” 

“You never ask. But you do think about it. Don’t you? Why we can never see one another’s surroundings. Why this happens at the times it does. Why . . . we can make physical contact through it.” Ben was going on. He was leaning forward again like the answer might be concealed on her tray, his hands pressing down on some surface at his end of the connection. “There must be limits. If one of us tried to pass something to the other from their side, what would happen? What are the rules here?”

He sounded like he’d been holding this back longer than just the last few minutes. Ben had clearly spent as much time thinking about it as she had. She wasn’t surprised. From the first, he always seemed to wonder more at the nature of the connection than she did. Yet where he voiced it nearly every time, these esoteric aspects were never the pressing matter to her. 

Not so for him; it was maybe all he’d had. It showed now in the way the gravity of his curiosity practically pulled him toward her. They never had the chance to talk about what happened on Ahch-To, beyond trying to leverage against each other what they’d seen when their hands touched. Now she thought that if her time with Ben on the _Supremacy_ had not ended so disastrously, they may have found answers together already. 

“You’re asking about rules? Why does it matter anymore?” Rey said. “That we can touch, or not, or exchange objects? I would think you can see why that’s actually a terrible idea, given that I shot at you the first time. It’s a lucky thing for you that we _can’t_ send anything across.”

Exploring the limits of this may have been tempting under other circumstances, but the situation as it stood made such a thing too risky. As someone whose custom it was to take things apart to learn how they worked, Rey struggled to accept her inability to glean understanding and then be reminded of the lack. The power inside her deepened faster than she had time to process, and when it came to the source, Rey felt she had little ground to stand on. Late at night she spent hours poring over the purloined Jedi texts when she could, often until she fell asleep, waking to hastily wipe drool from a page and secret the books away until it was time to begin again. Still everything about it frightened her at times. 

All she was certain of was that the connection had not been Snoke’s doing. It remained in spite of his death, and each day she felt a deeper inexplicable conviction that it had been there before even she realized. 

“You’re so sure of that.” Ben glanced down and drank something from a short cup, one eyebrow rising slowly. “So it never happened to you before that night you told me about the mirror. Something physically crossing over?”

She shook her head, wondering what he wasn’t saying. “I could always see you, but there wasn’t anything else.”

“It is possible, though. The second time. I could never see what was around you, but that time, it was raining? Or you were near the sea.”

The event sprang almost instantly to her mind, down to the exact exchange of words. She remembered how it felt: the storm on the island, how everything went from green to slick gray, the cold wind and ocean spray, the novel delight of the experience cut short by an unwanted invasion that left her unmoored. 

“I was. It was raining, too, though. A storm along the cliffs. The waves from below were being thrown up onto the rocks by the wind. You could hear it?”

“Distantly, but that wasn’t all. There was water. On my face after it ended.” His hand wandered absently to his chin, like he half expected to find some there again. His focus was soft and distant. “It seemed to come from nowhere, but it was completely real. I could even taste the ocean salt. This is what I’m saying. There’s some way things can get . . . crossed.”

Interesting. Her eyes fixed on the way Ben’s thumb brushed along his lower lip, and she forced her gaze down to her lap. Rey hadn’t realized that their contact in the hut had a sort of indirect, unintended precursor. The knowledge made her shiver a little. She racked her mind again to think of any moment before that when something similar had happened to her—a change in her surroundings or sensations or physical condition—but there was none. 

“It wasn’t something I did. Consciously, anyway. If it were, you’d have had a blaster hole through you the first time. And what’s that prove, beyond something else neither of us was able to control?”

“That there must be a way it could happen again. For us to control it, even. This bridge between us.”

Rey found it presumptuous of Ben to think she would want to, and was dubious about to what end they would bother trying. Except that her gut reaction to the notion was not one of disapproval. She was intrigued, at least in part. Theoretically. _This bridge between us._ And she was too worn out to be thinking of this seriously. 

“You should hear yourself,” she said with more severity than she intended. “We’re not allies. We’re not partners. We can’t keep treating this as if it’s completely independent of the choices you—we’ve made.”

Ben was studying her, piecing something together. Rey couldn’t tell if the weariness around his eyes and mouth was a result of the lack of insight or the demands of whatever it was he’d spent the day doing, which she didn’t want to speculate about. Perhaps it was just how long this was lasting; longer than the previous two, which only dragged because of tension. Even if it was a more civil meeting, the effects of emotional fatigue remained. 

“I don’t want to get into it tonight, Ben. I’m tired, and puzzling over all of this requires more energy than I can spare.” Her tone softened. “Believe me when I say that if we weren't talking right now, I'd have finished my food in half the time and probably be sleeping.”

“I could tell.” 

His tone was one of begrudging acceptance. Only when Ben settled back again, relaxing marginally, did she realize how much he had been leaning in. Rey watched the uncanny interplay of light from her room and his that dappled the paleness of his hands. It would have been easy to reach across and touch one of them; she would uncurl his fingers and lay her palm over his, press a finger to his wrist to count the course of blood through his veins, wait to see if his pulse tripped at her touch. 

But to do that would be to revisit that moment on Ahch-To, what could have happened, and circumstances were different now. It was dangerous to entertain even the idea. Even if—because—she half wanted to.

Ben looked as if he was expecting the connection to cease. Seconds ticked by, and still they faced each other. “Was that the first time you’d ever seen rain?”

“No.” This wasn't a turn she was expecting, but for the first time tonight it was a question she could answer to her own satisfaction. Even on an inconsequential topic, it was pleasurable to prove him wrong, and Rey smiled tightly. “The second. Jakku’s a desert planet, but it does get rain, very rarely. They called them century storms, or something like that. There was one years ago, but nothing is done to prepare for them . . . they arrive with little warning. They’re so unusual they’re practically considered myth. Until it’s too late.” 

Her expression fell at the memory of being twelve or thirteen years old, a grimy, scrawny thing trapped in the AT-AT for days on end. Dealing with dwindling portions and patching nearly daily leaks in the roof. Peering out now and again to spy only sheets of water blown by ripping winds or the distant sight of a hapless traveler barely avoiding the muddy, sucking sinkholes that began to appear after the first day. At first she was certain the world was ending; when it didn’t, she doubled down on her efforts to survive it.

“I was stuck for almost a week unable to get out and work. But it did give me loads of time to practice my flight simulators.” The ritual kept her from paying mind to the pain in her stomach as the food ran low and the creeping anxiety of being confined to the rusted guts of her improvised home.

Ben’s skepticism was immediate and evident. “Flight simulators you just happened to have on hand in the middle of a desert.” 

But his look gave way to something milder a moment later as he concluded on his own how Rey must have come to possess such a thing. She thought it might have been admiration and decided to take it as such.

“Built from pieces found in about five or six different craft. Hardware. Programming.” She nodded slowly at the recollection. The desert was a wasteland, but it could be plentiful if one knew what was worth salvaging and rebuilding. Rey’s knack for that had saved her life more than once. “An ongoing project. Probably wouldn’t have learned to pilot otherwise.” 

“You’re tenacious.”

She didn’t think he was disingenuous. It was a compliment—which warmed her, at first. But that warmth made her aware that she was not being guarded enough, and she reacted defensively. “I didn't have an ace pilot to teach me from the time I was old enough to work a console, so I had to make do.” 

Rey snapped her mouth shut so quickly her teeth clicked together. In the space of a sentence she’d managed to prod indelicately at his wounds and put her own on display. Was it possible anymore to have one without the other? 

She felt a flash of guilt, but it passed. Neither of them ever skirted around cruel, painful truths with the other. Maybe it was that up until this point, things had become unusually relaxed—she’d jarred herself into remembering who she was talking to, and what she was doing.

She waited to see what Ben did. He only looked prickly. She wasn’t even sure that what she’d said was accurate, but she didn’t need to be able to see into his mind to know that there was at least some kernel of truth to her observations. Ben’s face always hid so little from her. At this point she wasn’t sure if it was simply his way at all times or with her alone or the result of the Force binding them. She didn’t care to dwell on it as his mouth worked silently like he was shredding the remains of some retort he’d managed to quell.

Unwilling to continue down this line, Rey pulled both hands roughly through her hair and sighed shakily. Talking about Han, obliquely or directly, was still sore for her, for all that she knew him so briefly. And Ben would find a way to avoid the subject if she pursued it. Probably, he would redirect it onto her somehow. How she wished the connection would close now.

“I’m tired tonight. Next time, let’s . . .” she ventured, when the silence threatened to turn sour, “I suppose it might help to see if we can try and find a way to make this, whatever it is, work. Why it works. Try to find out more about how it works, I mean.” 

Rey didn’t know what she meant at all and was stumbling over her words, so she willed herself to wait for his reply. She held up her cup of water, as if to make a toast and legitimize the proposal.

“I suppose it might.” Ben had evidently worked through whatever Rey’s misstep provoked in him, enough so that he didn’t sound angry or even very annoyed. Just tired. He mirrored her gesture with his own cup, and they drank in unison— 

—and Rey’s face contracted in disgust. The water tasted wrong. The fact that it tasted like anything at all was wrong. The flavor was terrible, all bitter and burnt, and had she waited a moment longer to swallow, she would have spit it out instead. 

“What the hell! There’s—” Mildly horrified and deeply confused, Rey inspected the contents of her cup. Clear, ordinary water. She sniffed. Odorless. And yet, “There’s something wrong with my water. It tastes awful.” 

Ben looked perplexed. In her alarm it had taken a moment for Rey to realize she knew the flavor—she’d only tasted it once before. 

“In your cup,” she said, looking at him almost accusingly. “You have caf. I do _not_ have caf in my cup.” 

“I d— Ah.” Ben caught on quickly. “ _Ah_.” 

“I think I . . . _tasted_ it. When you did.” 

She hoped she’d only tasted it, as much as she’d hoped that her first taste several weeks ago had been her last. Rey needed a moment to settle the mild revulsion she experienced as she considered the implications of the alternative: that the caf Ben was drinking had actually crossed from his cup (she refused to entertain the second alternative, from his _mouth_ ) to hers. And then a moment more to settle the urge she had to be angry at him for it, as though he’d purposely manipulated the connection at her expense. “It _was_ only caf, right?”

“Yes. What else would—”

“Don’t do that again.”

His jaw tightened. “I can’t make promises about something I didn’t do.” 

Rey could see that he was affronted by the implication of some complicity on his part. That was perfectly acceptable to her. She’d been expecting him to immediately begin asking her about what she experienced, trying to figure out how it happened. Because, surely, this was potentially yet another variation of what he saw as a puzzle to be solved. 

For the time being, Rey preferred Ben’s moodier reaction to another battery of questions. And she still blamed him a little. “You know what I mean.” 

She cautiously sipped her water again and was relieved to find it exactly as tepid and inoffensive as it had been ten minutes earlier. And, now, it was a readily available means of getting rid of the lingering, evil flavor of caf. She squinted down into the cup, waiting for some problem to present itself, for the water to darken or begin to bubble threateningly. She wanted to brush her teeth, scrub her tongue, and go to bed. “Just don’t drink any more of that nasty stuff until this is—“

Rey felt the air shift with a barely perceptible change in pressure, and she looked across the table. She was alone. “—over.”


End file.
